Sydney’s sights

Early morning ferry traffic in Sydney Harbor

There are so many faces to Sydney and I have seen just a few. We toured the Opera House, led by a charming guide named Darryl. It was a great tour and the Opera House is quite a complex. It is not one “house” but a center with multiple performance venues from large to small.

The interior spaces are sculptural and refined, but a bit cool, not embracing. The images below show some of the public spaces – hallways, stairways, ticket counters, mezzanines.

The Rocks in Sydney is the area where the British convicts were deposited to survive or not, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. This area was nearly scraped to become a half mile of brutalist skyscrapers, but was saved in the end by activists who wanted to preserve the cheap-rent public housing there. The Rocks area has been quiche-ified into shops, restaurants and boutique offices. Some of the buildings are preserved, and there are narrow alleys and stairs where houses were built into the sandstone cliff.

The original paving of the Rocks, Nurses Walk

We walked across the Sydney Harbor Bridge this morning, which is a nice walk with great views of the harbor, the Opera House, the central business district, and the ferry traffic going in and out of Circular Quay.